


Strange Bargains

by StopTalkingAtMe



Category: Zone Blanche | Black Spot (TV)
Genre: Ambiguous Ghosts, F/F, Implied/Referenced Suicide attempt, Nightmares, Post-Season 2, Significant spoilers for seasons 1-2, Yuletide Treat, grief and mourning, references to canonical child abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-20
Updated: 2019-12-20
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:09:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21872737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StopTalkingAtMe/pseuds/StopTalkingAtMe
Summary: "I was leaving Bertrand," Léa said finally. "When you found me I’d already packed up my suitcases, taken the money from the safe… I was going to take Simon with me and leave Villefranche in the dust.""And yet," Laurène commented mildly, "you’re both still here."
Relationships: Laurène Weiss/Léa Steiner
Comments: 8
Kudos: 18
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Strange Bargains

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Rivine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rivine/gifts).



While Léa Steiner had never had a shortage of reasons for avoiding her father’s house over the years preceding his death, one of them was something she would never have shared with another living soul. It was all the worse for how little sense it made: an irrational and inexplicable fear that her life to date had been the result of an enchantment, and that to set foot in her father’s house again would be to break the spell. As if all her wishes had been granted by a bad fairy, and the price of that enchantment – naturally – her first-born child.

She struggled to admit it even to herself outside of the many nights when she lay awake clutched tight in the merciless grip of insomnia, counting the growing cracks in the perfect life she’d won and wondering where it had all gone wrong. Sometimes with Bertrand asleep in the bed beside her and sometimes not, but _always_ with the smell of that house seeping out of her pores, an unforgettable mingled reek of cigarettes and rotting food, the musk of dogs and her father’s sweat, as though his legacy had been inside her all along, and she’d been a fool to think she could ever escape.

In the darkened room, the smell seemed a living thing, coiling around her like smoke, growing in intensity until she could taste its ripe rotten stench on her tongue.

On the cusp of sleep, it was always far too easy to imagine that the sheets beneath her were cool from damp and the deep silence merely the moment of calm before the dogs began to bark, ghosts conjured by a mind ever-willing to play tricks on its owner. Those were the only times when she was glad to wake and find that Bertrand was missing, because when she was trapped in the labyrinthine passages of her father’s house, the presence of another body in her bed only made her think of Simon, her trusting baby brother, clinging to her for comfort and warmth and for whatever illusory safety she could offer him.

Even when they’d been kids that hadn’t been much.

No surprises really that when an escape route showed itself, dangled before her by Gérald Steiner, with his indulgent smile and his frostbite eyes, she’d grabbed for it.

She’d dream about it, her father’s house. And her father too: his unwashed skin and unshaven face seeming not to belong to a man, but to an animal.

In the worst of the dreams – the ones that only started after Marion’s disappearance – he’d wear a dog’s pelt, freshly flayed, with the slick shining underside like a silk-satin lining, and when he opened his mouth, Léa, a child once more, could see his black wrinkled lips, the deep-ridged palate, the sharp teeth jutting from wet, pink gums. Her father, wearing a dog’s skin. A dog’s muzzle.

It was a dream she’d been having on and off all her life in various forms. It had changed as her life had, developing new horrors and darker, deeper recesses, and anything might set it off – the smell of wet dog (and how it had broken her heart when she’d had to put her foot down when Marion wanted a puppy for her birthday), or a glimpse of Simon in town, his eyes shining with hurt and mute fury. Or even just a visit from Gérald, so charming when he chose to be, and wearing his Villefranche roots so lightly that she allowed herself to believe he was nothing like her father.

But Gérald had been a hunter too – those roots he liked to deny ran deep – and he knew how to set traps and how to bait them. To be around him was to feel the wire noose tighten around her throat, cutting through skin and into flesh. An old instinct and a deep one, the all-consuming terror of prey sensing the approach of the hunter, and it was an instinct she’d been forced to learn too young. Gérald had known exactly how to take advantage of it; he only had to look at her and she was back in the dream again, plunging beneath its surface and into choking darkness, back into the reek of her father’s house, which echoed with her brother’s screams.

  
  


* * *

  
  


It was the dogs that woke her. Or so she told herself anyway, when she rose from the bed. Her old bed, still flimsy and uncomfortable, the mattress cheap and thin. The first thing she’d done on moving in was to strip off the threadbare blankets and mildewed sheets, and replace them with rich Egyptian cotton, but the expensive replacements still felt damp to the touch and the smell of mould lingered.

Outside, the dogs kept barking.

She followed the muted sound of voices through the house and found Simon asleep on the sofa, slumped in front of the droning TV. Its flickering light illuminated his sallow face, shine in the grimy, greasy slick of his hair. It had shocked her the first time she saw him up close, how much older he looked, as though he had a decade on her rather than being her baby brother, but sleep smoothed away the anxieties in his face, made him look younger. She had to physically restrain herself from leaning close and burying her face in his hair, the way she used to do when they were kids.

He was a light sleeper, stirring almost at once, as if he’d realised that someone was watching him while he slept. He frowned up at her. "What is it?"

"Nothing," she told him. "You shouldn’t sleep on the sofa. It’s bad for your back. Go to bed."

He sat up, rubbing at his eyes. "The dogs are losing their shit."

"Yeah. I’ll deal with it."

Because as little as Léa wanted to find out what was outside driving the dogs into a frenzy, she wanted to let Simon do it even less. Especially since she had an idea what she might find out there: a shape of spun shadows, a creature of lichen and leathered skin and exposed bone. And a memory of something singing out in her blood, the same feeling she got every time she went hunting or fishing, every time she gutted or skinned a carcass, every time she stepped over the threshold of the forest and between the trees, into that world of damp earth and moonlight, as silent and still as a cathedral.

"Get to bed, Simon," she told him again. There was no trace of fear in her voice; she’d had a lot of practice over the years learning how to hide it.

"Yeah, yeah." He heaved himself off the sofa, scratching his fingers through his hair. Then he looked up sharply. "Hey," he said, jerking his chin at her. "Take the shotgun."

She nodded. She’d never had any intention of doing otherwise.

He raised his voice as she left the room. "It’s in the–"

"I know where it is," she called back.

Outside, autumn was gathering pace, carrying the bitterly cold knife’s edge of winter. It would be a bad one this year, so everyone was saying. She shivered, her breath fogging the air in wreaths around her, and the damp misty chill made her think of Marion, of rat-tailed hair and icy rivulets of marsh-water trickling across Léa’s skin.

The dogs in their cage were going mad, flinging themselves off the chain link fence, and she readied the shotgun, trying to tell herself the illusion of safety it gave her was convincing.

You couldn’t kill a god with a shotgun, after all.

But there was another fear, deeper and more certain, wrapping itself around her throat: that it wouldn’t be the thing with antlers, but Gérald fucking Steiner, come to settle the score. No one kept a tally of favours owed better than that cold-hearted bastard, and he always made certain to balance the books. He’d be exactly as they’d found him, too, most of his face stripped back to the bone by scavengers, and she’d be willing to lay good money on him baring his now-lipless teeth in a bitter death's head grin at the sight of her back where she belonged, because she’d never been anything more than a piece of trash.

For a moment, it was overwhelming, that fear. It stifled her, drawing iron bands tight around her chest so she could barely breathe. And then something else rose up inside her and she braced the shotgun against her shoulder.

She hoped it was him. She prayed that it was, because right now there was nothing she’d like better than to blow that asshole’s head straight off his shoulders.

"Should have done it a long time ago," she muttered, and gave a soft humourless laugh, before she advanced, calling out softly to the dogs.

They were already calming at her presence. Most had stopped throwing themselves against the fence, and a couple kept pace with her as she walked the length of the cage. They were upset though, still frightened. No Gérald Steiner, and no antlered man either, but _something_ had been here.

One of the dogs whined, pressing against the side of the cage, and she reached down, scratching his back through the fence. Saw then, on the other side of the cage, past the doghouses and the churned-up mud, a pallid shape. It might have been nothing. It _was_ nothing, but she found herself calling out and moving forward before she could stop herself.

It was Marion. Impossible though that was, she knew it was Marion, clawing her way out of Léa’s dreams. Maybe this was all it had taken to bring her back, Léa stepping back into this world that reeked of urine and dog shit, returning to the house she’d hated and the brother she’d failed, but the indistinct pallid figure was already starting to drift away, and although Léa called out to it, begged it – begged _her_ – to wait, by the time she turned the far corner of the cage it had gone.

It was never there, she told herself, but she’d had a lifetime of living with lies and she knew at once that this was one of them.

  
  


* * *

  
  


She’d been dreading sorting through her father’s things, but it turned out to be not that bad when she got into it. It helped that she’d started in the haze after she returned from the hospital, before she’d really had the chance to process what she was doing.

That was the state of mind she’d been in when she moved out of the house she shared with Bertrand too. She’d meant to time it so that he wouldn’t be there, but she’d judged it badly, and he came back as she was leaving, a bag slung over her shoulder. She’d been dreading this too – it was the first time they’d spoken since she’d told him it was over – but he’d been civil, and they’d swapped pleasantries and polite lies: how sorry she was to hear about his father amongst them. She marvelled at how smoothly she told that lie and how calmly Bertrand accepted it.

He’d been drinking. She could smell it on his breath when she leaned in to kiss his cheek, an undercurrent of whisky beneath the clean, fresh scent of his cologne, but he didn’t seem drunk. She supposed that was a good thing, but it still unnerved her for some reason she couldn’t quite pin down. When she reached the car and looked back, Gaspard, the Steiners’ ever-loyal attack dog, had appeared at his elbow.

Still, it had gone better than she’d expected and at least she had something to keep her busy now, an escape route from the memories and the nightmares she couldn’t shake.

Once Simon’s wrists had healed enough, he helped. The wounds had been shallow – it had been a piss-poor attempt at killing himself – but it had still taken some convincing to persuade Leïla he wasn’t a danger to himself any more and that she would look after him. If Léa had been a different sort of woman she might have been hurt at how dubious Leïla seemed at the prospect. _I know,_ Léa had wanted to say. _It’s ridiculous. But I’ll do it. There’s nowhere else for me to go._

Sorting through her father’s junk was easier than sorting through Bertrand’s too, since there were no memories of Marion to trip her up here. Just the sedimentary layers of a life she thought she’d left behind her long ago, and bad memories of a man she might have killed herself if she’d only had the guts.

What she wasn’t expecting were the good memories that were mixed in with the bad, and not all of them were of her mother. Denis Lefranc had always been a bastard, but there had been happy times too: it had been her father, after all, who’d taught her how to hunt. And there was her mother’s rosary, which she’d long thought lost, the well-worn wooden beads spilling through her fingers, as she cupped the crucifix in her hand, her heart aching.

Simon was sitting on his haunches, peeling apart a stack of old photographs, yellowed with age and sticking together.

"I think these are yours," he said. "Shit, you were so young."

She hooked the rosary over her neck and held her hand out. "Let me see."

She had no memory of the photographs being taken. Not surprising, since she must have been a kid at the time, judging by the few in which the house appeared, in far better shape than it was these days. Mostly they were of the forest, snapshots of plants, and interesting shapes, and weird growths that she’d seen fit to photograph for reasons she couldn’t fathom now: knotted roots that spread across the dirt like arthritic fingers, rock formations like figures draped with cloaks of moss, a spring, bursting forth from the ground behind a screen of thick bracken. Occasionally, they’d taken shots of each other. There was one of Léa, her arms outstretched as she balanced her way across a fallen log that bridged a ditch. And there was one of Laurène Weiss, too, lying on a bed of earth and moss with her hair spread out around her like a pre-Raphaelite painting.

In the entire stack, there was only one single photo of the two of them together – taken, Léa remembered with a squeeze of her gut, by her mother. In it they were sitting cross-legged on the lawn, one of the dogs sprawled across Léa’s lap, her fingers buried in the coarse ruff of fur at its neck. Arm in arm, both of them squinting from the sun, but grinning up at the camera. She couldn’t remember the last time either of them smiled like that.

"Léa?"

She shoved the photo to the back of the stack and throw it at him. "Burn them."

"You sure? You don’t want to–"

" _Simon._ " She said it sharper than she’d meant to, but her lower back was aching, and the nauseous feeling in her gullet had been growing for a while now. The smell of must and grime was making her want to retch, and the greasy film on her fingers made her skin crawl. What she needed, more than anything, was a shower, with water pummelling her back hard enough to hurt and hot enough to scorch. In this house she’d get neither; she'd be lucky to get a lukewarm rust-stained trickle. "It’s junk. Why are we even bothering to sort through it anyway? We should just burn it all."

"Even the house?"

"Especially the house." She pushed herself up, and stepped cautiously around the teetering piles. "Tear it down, and build something better in its place." He grunted and she glanced at him. "What?"

He shrugged, his expression tight and his lips twisting, unwilling to say anything until she said his name again, softer this time. He fiddled with his sleeve, the edge of the bandage peeping out. "So does that mean you’re staying?"

"In this house or in Villefranche?"

Another shrug, his eyes flat and hard. Unwilling to trust her, she guessed. She couldn’t blame him, but a pang of regret stabbed at her heart.

"I can’t bring a baby up here, Simon. Not in this house. I won’t do it." And then, as his eyes darkened, she reached out and caught hold of his hand. He’d dropped the stack of photos, and the one face up was one of the forest, with no people present, only a vertiginous shot of a scrap of bleached sky glimpsed through the canopy of the pine trees. "We’ll figure it out," she told him. "I promise you I’ll think of something."

And whatever happened, she promised herself, she’d stay with him. Do what she should have done a long time ago.

The photos went into the pile for burning, and even Léa was taken aback at how how little went into the other piles. She watched as Simon threw the photos onto the fire without even glancing at them – he’d already lost interest. She’d meant to let them burn, but snatched one of them from the fire at the last moment – the snapshot of herself and Laurène. She told herself that she saved it because her mother had taken it, and while that wasn’t exactly a lie, it wasn’t the whole truth either.

But then again, what was?

  
  


* * *

  
  


She kept seeing Marion. In her dreams, when it wasn’t Simon in her bed, but Marion, still wet from the marsh, her hair trailing over Léa’s chest and her dead eyes unseeing. A wet sound rattled in her chest and her fingers pinched at Léa’s swollen belly.

 _He brought me back_ , she said. _A life for a life._

And surely she was just talking about Léa’s father, but her dead wet hands were resting on the Léa’s belly, where she was just beginning to show. Where the baby lay, nestled in her womb, the little cuckoo that had stolen Marion’s place. As she stared up at her dead daughter, Marion’s lips peeled back from the teeth of a dog and her elf-locked hair was wound all about with reeds and brambles. Somewhere Simon was screaming.

It wasn’t just in her dreams either. At the side of Marion’s grave, unable to shake the feeling that the coffin was empty, she closed her eyes and waited for what she knew was coming – a small hand slipped into hers. She imagined it so vividly, wished it into being with all her heart, that when it didn’t happen the palpable sense of loss she felt was almost shocking. And when she opened her eyes, and stared across the graveyard, illuminated by the pale washed out light of early morning, she saw movement. The same pallid figure she was sure she’d seen by the dogs’ cage.

She followed it, winding her way through trees and past gravestones, at first with hope, and then with dread, because she’d realised where she was being led and that was the last thing she wanted to see.

Camille Laugier’s grave, which was tucked away in a quiet peaceful corner of the cemetery. Someone had left flowers for her, and recently too, because they were still fresh, and dry despite the morning’s early rain. It couldn’t have been the mother – Marie Laugier had been housebound for several years – and the brother wasn’t the type to bother with flowers. The bitch had no other family.

The air stirred around her, raising goosebumps on the nape of her neck. There was a sound, like the rattle of a last dying breath in a sunken chest. Léa exhaled sharply, the breath escaping her in a rush, and she wanted to turn away, but couldn’t because she knew what she’d see: the antlered man, the dark hunched thing which had come towards her as fast and swift as an animal, bringing with it the iron reek of blood.

It was close behind her. She could feel it, drawing closer, could hear its footsteps on the grass. She squeezed her eyes shut and trembled as it leaned in close, its breath stirring her hair.

  
  


* * *

  
  


She already knew what had happened to Marion. She’d sat in the _gendarmerie_ and pored over every detail in the case file as if she could find her answers there, like picking at a scab that just wouldn’t heal. This had been in the months after Camille Laugier, Gérald Steiner’s little spy, had been exposed as Marion’s killer, when Léa’s initial shock and grief had passed into a faded sort of numbness that made her feel like a ghost. But that hadn’t lasted long. Bertrand had descended into despair and the oblivion of drink, coming home reeking of whisky, or often not at all, and she’d had no choice but to drag herself out of it, because somebody had to.

It was Laurène who’d helped her with that, although Léa hadn’t told her that, and probably never would. When Ferrandis had brought her out of the forest, Laurène had been close to death, and Léa, numbed to virtually everything, had surprised herself by praying for the woman she’d thought she hated. She’d lit a votive candle, and that little flame, weak and flickering though it was, had been the first thing to pierce the numbed fog of her grief. She wasn’t fooling herself that it was her prayers that had saved Laurène though: no one in this strange benighted town was any more surprised by miracles than they were by mysterious deaths, the weirdness knitted into the fabric of Villefranche and all its citizens, including Léa herself.

With Laurène on leave and Ferrandis struggling to cope with the needs of the town, Chief Adjutant Hermann was the only person in the _gendarmerie_ when she sat, paging through the police report on her daughter’s murder, and she took a certain petty pleasure in that, because he was grieving too: the murderer had been his little favourite and as far as Léa was concerned he was just another middle-aged man who’d been sniffing around after a woman young enough to be his daughter. The Villefranche rumour mill had it that he’d vanished shortly after the news broke, disappearing into the forest while Ferrandis and the prosecutor scrambled to cope, and he still wore his grief openly, drawn about himself like a cloak.

He smoked and answered her questions with monosyllabic grunts. And she had a _lot_ of questions, more than she could ask. More than she needed to. What she wanted to do was take every sordid detail of the crime and throw them all in his face, demanding to know how they could all have failed to notice that Marion’s murderer had been one of them all alone. Sitting at her desk – the desk where her fucking shit was still laid out, for God’s sake, and at which he kept stealing glances – answering the phone and drinking coffee and laughing.

She’d always been scared of Hermann. When she was fifteen, she’d been caught shoplifting make-up, and it was him who drove her home in a forbidding silence, the knot in her chest tightening the closer they got to her house until it was wrapped so tight around her heart she couldn’t breathe. She saw the look in his eyes when he saw the state of the place: the churned up yard, and the house falling apart, the window casements half-rotted and the yard overgrown, and she might have burned with shame except that her fear was stronger.

Her father’s silhouette had appeared in the doorway, obscured by the rain that streaked the windows. Her hands clenched tight on her legs, fingers digging into her thighs through her too-tight jeans, and she couldn’t look at Hermann as she whispered, "Please don’t tell my father."

"He’s a good man, your father," Hermann said. Maybe he even believed it. Christ knew, Denis could be charming when he wanted to be; he knew how to don the mask like the rest of them, and slip into the persona of the perfect husband and father, and he and Hermann drank at the Eldorado together. They were friends, insomuch as a man as private and insular as her father could have friends. Hermann fell silent for a moment, watching her. There wasn’t a damn thing she could do about that, so she stared out of the window, her gaze unfocused, watching the wipers sweeping sheets of rain away from the glass. Condensation fogged up the windows, but she knew her father was watching her too. She wasn't sure which one of them she hated more. Finally, Hermann swivelled in the driver’s seat, turning towards her and lowering his voice. "Anything you want to tell me?"

He’d terrified her back then, cast as he was from the same Villefranche mould that had produced her father, bluff and blunt and belonging to the forest. The land ran in his veins the same way it did in Denis Lefranc’s. And Léa’s, too, although she hadn’t realised it then.

She shook her head and forced herself to sit straight in the seat. "I didn’t mean to take the lipstick. I forgot to pay for it." And she was proud of herself at how strong she managed to keep her voice, edged with a touch of contempt. The frightened little girl had gone. He kept staring at her, until Léa lifted her head and met his gaze, her own challenging. He was the one who looked away first.

"Yeah, okay," he said, staring at the house. "Go on, get out of here. Tell your father I gave you a lift home because of the rain. I’ll speak to the shopkeeper." And then, raising his voice as she got out of the car, to be heard over the rain, with an undercurrent of warning, "Don’t do it again."

After she was done going through the case file, she’d wondered if he still remembered her as that skinny bitter fifteen year old. Léa still caught glimpses of her, reflected in rain streaked windows and foxed mirrors. Her hair might be better styled and coloured these days, and her clothes better tailored, but she was still that kid, scrambling to survive and forever struggling to find her feet.

On the way out, she stopped at Camille Laugier’s desk. What had it been about her, she wondered. Léa had barely even noticed her, and their circles had seldom crossed. The few times they’d met she’d seemed a quiet little mouse, although once or twice she’d come out with something unexpected that suggested there was another side to her, as if she was a blade with an unexpectedly sharp edge. And even so Léa had never thought twice.

But she _should_ have. Out of all of them, including Bertrand, she was the one who knew what Gérald Steiner was capable of, and she should have realised that he would have done everything in his power to get a mole inside the _gendarmerie_. Camille Laugier was the obvious weak link.

There was a photograph of her on the desk and she picked it up. At the edge of her vision, Hermann stiffened, his pecking at the keyboard slowing until he was stabbing at each individual key, then he slowly lifted his head and stared fixedly at the picture in her hands.

She turned it around so he could see it, and although he kept himself motionless emotions flickered across his face – heartache, guilt, grief, fury – before he managed to school his expression. Badly, because men like him were never all that great at keeping their emotions veiled. She could still read every line of his heartache scrawled in the new lines around his eyes, and she hated him for it, for grieving for a murderer when he’d probably given Marion less than a minute’s thought.

"In the police report, it says Laugier claimed she didn’t leave the body where it was found," she said.

For a moment he didn’t react. Then he plucked off his reading glasses and let them drop. "According to Cora Weiss." As he spoke, he stood up and started to move around the side of the desk, holding out his hand for the photograph. There was an air of menace about the way he moved which she couldn’t quite tell if she was imagining or not. She stepped backwards, out of his reach.

"So who did?" She’d seen the photographs of the body, how eerie they were, Marion curled up as if she was merely asleep and would wake up at any moment. "Because somebody laid her out, Hermann. If it wasn’t _Camille Laugier_ –" She spat the name at him, "–then who?"

He snatched the photo out of her hands, and set it back on the desk without even looking at it. "We don’t know that yet."

"That’s not good enough."

He lifted his gaze to hers, not bothering now to hide his grief. There seemed nothing menacing about him any more, and maybe there never had been; he was just a weary man who’d probably have been considering full retirement by now if he'd had anything other than work in his life to distract him from the pull of the forest. "It’s all we have."

  
  


* * *

  
  


She was glad she’d done it in a way, even if it had left her with more questions than answers. Knowing the details helped. Marion’s death had been an accident, unexpected and quick. She hadn’t been beaten or brutalised or raped. She probably hadn’t even seen it coming. It had just been a stupid pointless unnecessary accident, and in the crime scene photographs there’d been a strange sort of tender care about the way her corpse had been laid out.

It reminded Léa of placing Marion in her cot as a baby, pulling up the blankets to tuck her in, stroking her silk-soft spun-gold hair, reading to her when she was little, and listening to her read when she was old enough to try. There was a strange kind of comfort in it. But still the question kept returning to her, if Laugier hadn’t lain Marion out like that, then who had?

For a while, she hadn’t thought those questions mattered. She’d lived with unanswered questions all her life, shutting her ears to her mother’s cries, turning a blind eye to Gérald Steiner’s businesses, and to Bertrand’s affairs. She was used to not knowing. She thought she preferred it that way.

It was that night which had changed her, after her father’s death and the realisation of how badly she’d failed her brother had finally given her the strength to do what she should have done a long time ago, and, as if in punishment, had seen the thing she’d glimpsed in the gathered shadows of her darkened house, the antlered man, and everything he’d brought with him.

Since then, it was as if the floodgates had opened and Marion was all she could see, all she could think about. Marion and the forest and the whispers of the Horned God.

What had happened out in the forest on Samonios, she didn’t know. None of the stories she’d heard made any sense, but that didn’t mean that they weren’t true, no matter how crazy the tales of men being yanked off their feet and hauled forty feet into the air before being flung back down with their backs or necks broken. Six men dead, plus Gérald Steiner, and no one was saying anything at all about what happened to him, or to the woman from the DREAL. There had to be a rational explanation, of course, and it was generally agreed – although no one actually looked at each other _when_ they agreed – that the madman must have set snares amongst the trees. No one had yet found any evidence of ropes, but that didn’t mean they hadn’t been there, because what was the alternative?

And all the while Marion was in her mind, whispering, _He brought me back_.

If there ever had been an enchantment, the spell had already been broken many times over. Gérald Steiner was dead, and although if anyone was able to reach back across the barrier between the living and the dead, she’d put good money on it being him, another spell had been broken: she wasn’t afraid of him any more. And she was done with not having answers.

So she called Laurène.

  
  


* * *

  
  


The marsh-water was flat and glassy, milky as a cataract, reflecting the overcast sky and the mist that drifted in wreaths around them. Tree trunks rose like petrified stone out of the water, crows arrayed upon the branches, their carrion song a fingernail scratching at the inside of Léa’s skull as she followed in Laurène’s wake, the chill of the freezing water creeping gradually through her waders.

None of it made any sense.

She knew what had brought Laurène here, the breadcrumb trail she’d followed that had led her to Marion’s body, but the two things didn’t seem to connect, as though there had to be an underlying meaning, a missing link they didn’t know of yet. Marion hadn’t been drugged and she hadn’t been offered up as a sacrifice to all-but-forgotten gods: her death had been a stupid banal mistake.

Unless…

She felt a momentary flash of doubt as cold as the mists wreathing around them, and she fixed her gaze on Laurène, shifting the fragments of the jigsaw around in her mind. Laurène who’d gone missing in the forest for three days, and had never spoken about it afterwards, not to Léa, and not, as far as Léa knew to Bertrand either. Laurène who seemed to blend into the mist, a washed-out wraith with the forest in her blood. What if it had been Laurène who’d dredged Marion up from wherever she’d been buried, and laid her out on a soft bed of reeds? But why? For what purpose?

And it had been Cora Weiss who’d been the reason that Camille Laugier had been exposed, she remembered. All the evidence seemed to rest on her witness statement. Camille Laugier was dead; she’d never had the chance to speak her case.

Something flickered in the mist. Léa looked up sharply, tearing her gaze away from Laurène’s back to the bleak stretch of water, broken by slick-wet tussocked humps of grass, breaking the surface of the water like the back of an enormous water-snake. She half expected to see a ghost watching them – Gérald Steiner, perhaps, or the thing that had left the stag’s spine for Bertrand.

 _Or for me_ , she thought, and fear clamped tight around her throat and squeezed. She stopped, feeling the bitter cold on her wet cheeks. A sound echoed in her mind: bare feet on plush carpet, a sibilant hiss, the scrape of naked bone on plaster.

"You okay?" Laurène had stopped and was looking back.

Léa gave a jerky nod and straightened up.

"If you’re feeling sick we can head back."

Léa gave her a sharp, suspicious look, but there was nothing in Laurène’s expression except concern. "No." Her voice was shaky, so she repeated herself more firmly, shaking her head. "No. I want to see this through. We’ve come this far."

  
  


* * *

  
  


"Did you ever think that I could have killed him?" Léa asked after they’d waded for a long time in silence. She’d meant her father, but she was thinking about Gérald Steiner too, the way they’d found his body.

"Even if I did," Laurène said, her voice even and her expression giving nothing away, "you had an alibi. You were with your brother."

Léa choked back a bitter laugh, unable to help her lips twisting. She shook her head in disbelief. "You did think it."

Although she wasn’t sure why she was surprised. She was remembering, perhaps as Laurène was, a time when they’d been kids, fourteen maybe, and she’d had a rare sleepover at Laurène’s house. It had been one of those nights when sleep had proved elusive, and the room had seemed too quiet and still, the darkness the kind that seemed designed for swallowing up secrets. She hadn’t known whether Laurène was asleep or not and, although she’d searched Laurène’s face in the morning afterwards in search of a sign, still to this day she didn’t know.

In the darkness, though, it hadn’t mattered to her whether Laurène was awake or not. A seed had been planted in her mind by the rumours she’d overheard about a couple of hikers who’d gone missing – just another Villefranche statistic – and that seed had grown into a poisonous little plant, rooting itself deep. When she spoke, her voice sounded shockingly loud in the dense silence of the bedroom.

"I think I’m going to murder my father," she’d said, and had only realised then how desperately she wanted it to be true.

Now Laurène had moved ahead of her, apparently pretending not to have heard. When Léa said her name she stopped and tilted her head up towards the overcast sky, then turned around, slowly. "Not at first."

"Then when?"

"When you came into the _gendarmerie_ with an alibi for your brother."

She exhaled, remembering the carefully blank expression on Laurène’s face and the pen in her seldom-still fingers that gave everything away, hinting at the unseen currents churning beneath the still flat surface. "You thought I was protecting myself instead of Simon."

"Maybe. Or maybe you were in it together."

Léa hesitated, then started again, her boots sinking through the deceptive covering of grass and into the water. The sense of trespass intensified.

"You really thought that?"

Laurène paused to take her bearings. "Not for long. When we finally found the missing dog, it had died from an axe-blow. I could believe you killed your father, but..." She trailed off, shrugging.

"You believed I was capable of butchering my father with an axe, but not one of the dogs?"

Laurène cast a cool assessing glance her way. "It’s true, no?"

Léa had no answer for that.

"Anyway," Laurène said, "it was messy. You’d have done a better job of it."

"A hunting accident," Léa said after a moment. The mists seemed to be growing thicker as they moved deeper into the marsh. A splashing sound came from somewhere off to her right. "That’s how I would have done it. No one would ever have known it was anything but an accident."

"It sounds a lot like Gérald Steiner’s death."

"If I had to do it, that’s how I would have done it."

Laurène stopped and turned back towards her. There was no accusation in her eyes. Beneath the waterproof her hands were still, the only movement the ripples of the water around her waders and even they were slowing as the water smoothed back to glass. "Did you kill him?"

And now Léa did laugh, safe in this one, because at least this was safe ground even if nothing else was. She had a rock-solid alibi. "No, but I wish I had," she said, and the venom in her voice took even her aback. "Him and that Laugier bitch."

"It’s strange, don’t you think?" Laurène said, and still she wasn’t making an accusation, just a mild, quiet observation, "How people you hate keep getting murdered? Camille, your father. Now Gérald Steiner."

"I’m just lucky." Although it wasn’t luck. She knew she should have been glad they were dead, that she should be relieved she no longer had to live in fear either of her father or of Gérald Steiner, and that Camille Laugier had faced a sort of justice – and she did sincerely hope that bitch was rotting in hell – but she felt neither pleasure nor relief. She felt nothing but a sense of thwarted grief and rage, as though their deaths at the hands of other people had stolen something from her. "And I thought you were treating my father-in-law’s death as an accident?"

Laurène ignored that. "What do you know about Gérald’s death?"

"Apart from how badly he deserved it?" She offered Laurène a hard smile. "Almost nothing. I was distracted at the time. I’m sure there are plenty of nurses who can confirm I never left the hospital. Or ask Leïla."

"I have asked Leïla. She says you never left the hospital."

Léa inclined her head, as if to say ‘there you go’. "Bertrand won’t want you poking around. The last thing he needs is a scandal right now. I thought the two of you would be in agreement over this. Accidents happen, especially in this town. It was a stray bullet, a wild dog..."

"Wolf." Her voice sounded strange. Distant. "It was a wolf."

"There are no wolves around here."

"There are. I’ve seen one. It was a wolf."

"If you say so," she said, and the truth was she believed it, but Laurène was on edge, and seemed to take it as sarcasm.

"You don’t know what it was like. You weren’t there. There were bullets flying everywhere, everyone was panicking, and the forest..."

"What about the forest?"

"It doesn’t matter."

Except that it seemed it did. _She’s afraid,_ Léa thought, and for some reason it was this which disturbed her more than anything.

Laurène was staring at her, seeming on the verge of saying something, but whatever it is, she must have thought better of it, because instead she said, "I don’t need the mayor’s permission to investigate a suspicious death."

"Have you slept with him yet?" Léa kept her voice conversational, but an edge had crept in anyway. She wasn’t really expecting Laurène to answer, but she did anyway.

"There’s nothing between me and Bertrand."

"I don’t care what the two of you do." Although she wasn’t certain, really, whether that was true or not. "You should stay away from him."

"I thought you didn’t care."

"I don’t. That isn’t why." And because she couldn’t bear the hard-to-read look Laurène was giving her, she lifted her gaze to the bone-white sky. "He tells himself he’s nothing like his father because it’s the only way he can sleep at night. He doesn’t want to admit to himself how alike they really are."

"Did Bertrand kill his father?"

"Would it matter if he had?"

A moment passed before Laurène answered, and she sounded troubled. "I don’t know."

Léa gave a soft little scoff. "You were going to let me commit perjury, but you won’t do the same for the love of your life?"

"Maybe that’s because I knew you didn’t do it."

Léa didn’t have an answer to that. She fell silent for a moment, watching a crow wheel against the sky. "I was leaving Bertrand," she said finally. "When you found me I’d already packed up my suitcases, taken the money from the safe… I was going to take Simon with me and leave Villefranche in the dust."

"And yet," Laurène commented mildly, "you’re both still here."

Which was something else Léa didn’t have an answer to.

  
  


* * *

  
  


It was both more and less than she expected, a hollowed nest of reeds placed as if deliberately in a pool of stinking mud, and she fell to her knees on the matted construct, the water pooling around her knees. It seemed – although it was purely her imagination – that she could see the depressions where Marion’s body had lain, and she held her hands over them, summoning up her memory of the crime scene photos, of that image of Marion, filthy and slick with mud, but only ever sleeping.

She’d thought herself prepared for it, but she’d been wrong: this was something she never could have prepared for.

She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, probably smearing mud across her face. She never had liked to cry in front of anyone, even as a child. Even then she’d been building up the walls around herself, walling herself off brick by brick, resenting everyone but most of all the ones she suspected could see through her defences. Maybe that was why she’d turned to Gérald: he’d never once offered her pity.

A hard bitter knot of rage formed in her chest, so intense she couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe, could do nothing but shake with wordless fury and the sudden urge to rip at the fabric of this place, to tear up the reeds, and break the hollow to pieces, to shatter beyond repair the mournful weight of heartache that had fallen upon this ancient place like a shroud.

Laurène moved closer and placed her hand on her shoulder. For a moment, Léa tensed, and then she relented, turning towards the other woman with a wordless plea. Laurène dropped to her knees, and folded Léa into her arms, letting her press her face against the cold smooth plastic surface of Laurène’s waterproofs.

"I’m so sorry," Laurène told her, her voice soft.

Léa barely heard her. She was thinking of Marion: as a baby, as a child, as a girl on the cusp of womanhood, and always so strong, able to stand up to both her father and her grandfather in a way that Léa could never have done. But then, Marion hadn’t grown up with Denis Lefranc as a father – she hadn’t known what it was like to become so focused on escape, you were like an animal in a trap, forgetting everything else.

It was the cause of the worst fight she’d ever had with her daughter, when she’d found out Marion had been to visit Denis and Simon without telling her. Marion had thrown it all back in her face: what a snob she was to be ashamed of where she came from, and it had felt like a kick in the guts. It had all come rising up in her like bile, the urge to spill it all, every bruise, every black, bitter little secret which so far she’d managed to keep hidden.

In the early days when Marion had gone missing, it had been one of her worst fears, that it had been Denis who’d killed her, and that Marion had died because Léa hadn’t been able to bring herself to tell her scornful daughter the truth. Because she’d thought her daughter one of the lucky ones for having the luxury of thinking herself invulnerable, however briefly.

Laurène had thought that way too, and no doubt so had Cora, but Léa never had. She’d learned too early in her life that it was a lie. She’d never had her All-Nighter either, or not exactly: there hadn’t seemed much point when she’d already spent her first night in the forest when she was fourteen, running from her father’s fists.

Sabine talked about contracts made with the forest, and for all her mystical pagan bullshit she was right, but there was nothing spiritual or magical about them. They were hard and bitter things, fashioned out of iron-rich soil and frost-bitten pine needles, and of wet earth and decay, and every bit as base as the devil’s bargain Léa had once made with Gérald Steiner long ago. Survival, at all costs.

"I wish I could have found her for you," Laurène told her. "I never wanted anyone to go through what I did."

"She didn’t." Her voice cracked on a sore swollen knot in her throat, which she tried, and failed, to swallow down. "She died quickly. And I knew she was dead even before you found her. I always knew."

Laurène pressed her hand against the back of her head, fingers burrowing into her hair. "I would have known if it was Cora. That’s what it is to be a mother. It doesn’t mean–"

"The forest took her."

Even as Léa said it, she recognised how crazy it sounded, but she knew at the same time that it was the truth. 

It wasn’t something she would have been able to admit to herself until she’d seen the antlered creature in her house, its skin mottled with lichen, and dark and rough as tree bark, the wet gleam of eyes and slick pink gums, the antlers deeply rooted in its skull, so long that when it stood at full height, the tines scraped against the ceiling, bringing down a haze of plaster dust. All about it shadows swarmed, rife with life and movement, and the scent of pine trees so thick in the air.

She’d stumbled backwards, screaming as it dropped into a crouch and came for her, and then her back had hit the wall and she’d sunk down, whimpering in terror. It had answered her with a chittering call, ending with what sounded like the snapping of teeth, and then had came the scuff of bare feet on the carpet and Marion was there, dropping to her knees beside her mother. She was naked, her pale skin shining in the gloom as if awash in moonlight, and she was smiling, despite her wet and dripping skin, her drenched hair. Cold droplets of water dripped from her rat-tailed hair, tracing their freezing pathways down Léa’s throat and beneath her collar. Marion took hold of her cheeks and leaned in closer, and the wall against Léa’s back felt as hard as rock, the carpet a spongy surface of moss.

It isn’t real, she told herself. It was just another corridor in the dreams about her father, and that was what she kept telling herself until Marion had brought her bloodless lips to her mother’s ear and began to whisper.

Laurène had gone still against her, and Léa wondered then just what it was that Laurène had been chasing down when she followed that trail of breadcumbs to this hollow and this still and sacred place. The same thing Léa was looking for, she supposed: an answer to a question, but whatever that question was Léa would have laid good money on the answers not being anything good.

"You should let it go, Laurène," she said. "Whatever it is you’re looking for. Let it go."

A long time passed before Laurène answered, and when she did her voice was so quiet, Léa barely heard her. "I don’t think I can."

Léa pulled away, just far enough that she could see Laurène’s face. She was holding in her mind a memory of a bed, and of a hand, still whole, clutched in hers. She found Laurène’s maimed hand now, and ran her thumb across the strap that held down the stubs of her missing fingers. In a way, for all that they came from different backgrounds, they’d led mirrored lives. She’d used to watch Cora and Marion’s friendship developing, wishing, though she would never have voiced it out loud, that things could have gone differently for her and Laurène. But she’d been too much of a coward, and had never quite seen a way to bridge the gap between them without risking what she’d seen as her grip on Bertrand.

It was different here, as though all the trappings of their lives had been stripped away, gnawed right down to the bone. Here in the marshes, in the fields, in the forests of Villefranche, they were different people. She was different.

Léa slid her hand to Laurène’s cheek. Watchful eyes held hers, but Laurène had gone still, even her normally busy restless hands. Waiting.

Léa kissed her. It was a careful closed-mouth kiss, and almost chaste, or it would have been if Laurène hadn’t opened her lips beneath Léa’s with a tentative brush of the tip of a tongue. The next kiss had the same air of exploration, but it was harder and there was nothing tender or sweet about it. There couldn’t have been: not here, in this place where Marian had been given up to whatever gods awaited their due and where Laurène’s own daughter had almost died.

Death still suffused the place, and the crows bore witness, their raucous calls like the echo of her heart, and the mist muffling all sounds. Both women shivered as they pressed closer for warmth, not tender, but reverent.

The mist was closing in around them and the light had darkened. Only a couple of hours left until twilight. They’d need to be heading back soon but for the moment they stayed, clinging to each other. The sound of splashing came from somewhere across the marsh, the mist throwing off the direction so it could have come from anywhere. Just a bird taking flight, but the image that entered Léa’s mind was one of Marion, cold and dead and knee-deep in the water, and standing at the right-hand side of a god.


End file.
